Jessica Ekomane “Music has this capacity to make you feel the whole possible and impossible spectrum of your emotions […] and I want to appeal to all of it, all at once”
Jessica Ekomane (Photo: Philippe Gerlach)
Jessica Ekomane’s sound doesn’t merely fill a space – it redefines it. The Berlin-based composer and sound artist, with French and Cameroonian roots, operates at the intersections of psychoacoustics, rhythm, and perception. Her work is often articulated through multichannel sound, especially her signature four-speaker live performances, which she uses not as a spatial gimmick (and I say this because with many artists it does feel like that) but as a compositional necessity. In these sonic architectures, pulses phase, collide, and dissolve into each other, creating illusions that continuously recalibrate the listener’s sense of presence and direction.
Ekomane approaches sound as both a physical material and a social force. Her 2019 album “Multivocal” (released on Important Records) offered a stunning entry point into her practice, where rhythm becomes a shifting topology rather than a fixed grid. Her piece Solid of Revolution, in particular, blurs the line between aesthetic experience and political proposition: how can sound suggest a new social geometry?
Live, her performances generate a liminal state between intense focus and dreamlike dissolution. Drawing inspiration from minimalism, club culture, computer music, and non-Western rhythmic traditions, Ekomane is less concerned with genre than with effect: how sound behaves, how it occupies, how it transforms.
At a time when electronic music often folds into the predictable comfort of genre codes or algorithmic smoothness, Ekomane insists on fracture, tension, multiplicity. Hers is not the sound of escape, but of confrontation—sometimes meditative, often disorienting, always exacting. She invites listeners not just to hear differently, but to become different through hearing.
Recently Kunstwerke was showing Jessica Ekomane`s exhibition “Antechamber”.
Jessica, listening to your composition “Never Odd or Even” from your album Multivocal, it feels as if you’re trying to distract rhythm from its original purpose of giving structure and orientation, throwing it off track. As a listener, you often don’t know which direction the sounds want you to follow. To what extent do you enjoy when orientation isn’t made easy for the listener?
Jessica Ekomane: I’ve often been interested in playing with the boundaries of perception by way of probing the edges of known structures. In order to do this, I like to retain a balance between strict organisation and chaos. Actually the track you mention is extremely structured: the concept is immovable and predetermined, you can predict the behaviour of the music all along. Yet the shifts happen at a smaller quantification rate than the usual musical grid (it is counted in milliseconds), and smaller than what the human senses are able to detect. You can hear the forward movement, yet you’re unable to clearly perceive it happening in the moment. I think one thing I like the most when listening to a piece of music is being disoriented, finding something unexpected and beautiful. So naturally I’ve felt drawn to this feeling when making music.
Interesting you say that in regards to Multivocal, a good example how different we perceive things.
Let’s take one step back: what initially drew you to multichannel sound? Was it an aesthetic decision or a conceptual necessity?
Jessica Ekomane: It was a matter of the environment in which I started my practice I think. In my early days in Berlin I was surrounded by a lot of sound nerds, there were especially quite a few supportive women friends making electronic music such as Jasmine Guffond for instance. I was also reflecting on sound within its spatial context. I had the occasion to work with multichannel systems back then, and subsequently it became natural for me to try something with quadraphonic sound for live concerts. 4 speakers is the minimum that you need if you want to get a proper sense of space, and it is a format that is easily accessible for most music venues. But I am not a dogmatic person, and I am presently curious again to explore the more usual format of stereo sound.
What got you interested in working with sound in the first place?
Jessica Ekomane: It was a mix of personal interest and being in the right environment. I grew up in a rather small working class place in the centre of France near Tours, where it wasn’t easy to get access to experimental music. Yet a combination of obsessively visiting the music section of the municipal library every week, an insatiable curiosity, followed by the arrival of desktop computers with internet, led me to develop a taste for the most diverse and at times obscure musical forms I could find. But it was all a lonely activity. When I arrived in Berlin about 15 years ago with my one small luggage, I discovered all the cultural offering here as well as all the freaks populating the city, and it all really blossomed. People were already thinking through the category of sound here, there had been a history of sound art in the city since a long time. I realised I was already thinking in those terms as well, but I didn’t yet have the vocabulary and means for it.
Do you remember the first piece of music that really touched your heart? If so, which one was it, and in what context did you hear it?
Jessica Ekomane: I don’t exactly have a linear story to offer, and I could pinpoint a lot of different types of music that touched my heart first, for many different reasons. For example, I think one of the first albums I bought with my own money was Let’s Talk About Love, by Céline Dion. Some of my friends laugh at me when I say it but I still have a soft spot for this music from my teens. To cite something that would be more relevant to what I do today, I could say that either Radiohead’s Kid A or the early Björk’s albums were some of my first big musical shocks because of the inclusion of all those weird electronics. As my music obsession was a lonely activity at the time, the context was most likely in my teen room, after coming back from the municipal library to check all those new CD’s I got from there.
While typing this, I’m listening to your track “Manifolds” from your co-release with Laurel Halo on GRM portraits. To me, this specific track sounds very evil, like you’re opening a door to the underworld. Can you say something about what it is you’re looking for in music?
Jessica Ekomane: That’s true, the beginning of the piece does sound a bit scary and evil. While listening to it, I can feel I was quite angry and full of contradictory feelings when I started the process of writing it, because of all the things that were happening in the world in that moment simultaneously. There was COVID, George Floyd… A really destabilising time. It is extremely hard for me to say what I’m looking for in music in a single sentence, because I’m not searching only for one thing, and also my interests change over time. I could say perhaps that I’m looking for a specific feeling, something beyond words, close to the sublime. Music has this capacity to make you feel the whole possible and impossible spectrum of your emotions and beyond, and I want to appeal to all of it, all at once.
(Little kaput advertisement: here’s a link to an older interview I did with Laurel Halo: )
Jessica Ekomane (Photo: Camille Blake)
How did this co-release with Laurel come about?
Jessica Ekomane: Both pieces are commissions by the GRM in Paris. They run a series called GRM portraits, which was first started in collaboration with Editions Mego and now continues with Shelter Press. The idea of the series is to have split records between two artists presenting the piece they did for the acousmonium system. François Bonnet, the current director of GRM, asked me if I wanted to release my piece as part of their series, and I believe Laurel had presented hers around the same time period. I think this is a wonderful idea, as it leads to be curious and discover new artists that way. Those pairings also make the music on each side resonate in an interesting manner with each other.
Are you someone who easily bonds with other artists?
Jessica Ekomane: I approach the music scene like an ecosystem that each of us is part of and in which we are all linked. I’m always searching for kindred spirits and I like to cultivate a healthy and inspiring environment around me. But it is not possible to bond with everyone, because not everybody has the same objectives, or it has to be the right moment. It’s also really dependent on whether we are able to connect on a personal level first and foremost.
And how important is exchange with other artists, curators, thinkers for your own work?
Jessica Ekomane: A lot of my work develops mostly through my own personal research, with myself. But I think if some external exchange influences it, it would definitely be through my musical peers in my friend circle or while being touched by a concert on tour or at home.
Can you talk a bit about how your background in arts influences your current methodology as a composer and artist?
Jessica Ekomane: I think my work has strong extra-musical conceptual foundations because I studied art history and (sound) art. It also gives me a direction when I make music. But I am not a classically trained composer. Beyond that, I think I personally also just really appreciate artists that have deeper ideas in their work and are able to express those through words.
Would you consider your music political? If so, how do those politics manifest, through structure, through disruption, or through the very act of listening itself?
Jessica Ekomane: I often say that for me, the political is rather what is around the work and often invisible to the public eye. For instance it is present in how you work with people, the discussions you have in the scene with your peers, in everything that takes place outside of performance. I feel that sometimes it’s really easy to get seduced by the aesthetics of an idea, by a nice sounding sentence, or to get more into performative gestures rather than deeper structural interrogations. Having the real talks, in private, directly with people, or entering into direct action, those are much more difficult things to do and much less rewarding when you can’t capitalise on it. That said, there are many threads inside my work or within my inspirations which definitely have political implications, even though the end result is quite abstract. But choosing to explore non-mainstream musical aesthetics is quite a political choice already.
Jessica Ekomane (Photo: Camille Blake)
To what extent do you feel your French and Cameroonian roots influence how your work is received by both audiences and critics?
Jessica Ekomane: To be honest, I don’t really have a proper insight in how my work is being received. I occasionally get a feedback, or sometimes I randomly get to know that some people have started an urban legend and possibly misunderstood what I’m doing. Lately I’ve been doing more projects in France, I won an award too, and it felt good for me to have some recognition back there. In general, I have the impression that some years ago many people outside of that country didn’t really have an understanding of the colonial history of France and how that reflects in its population. There was a quasi-invisibility of the African diaspora besides the Anglo-Saxon world, which has historically been dominating the global narrative and representation. I feel like this is slowly changing and there is a bit more presence of non-native English speakers from the diaspora internationally. But certainly, belonging to this category while being a woman and making experimental electronic music that is neither pop nor club music can be a challenge, and lead to tough inter-personal encounters or to some people wanting to stand on your way, not help you or not see you. Luckily there’s also been a lot of wonderful positive experiences too, for which I am thankful!
Let’s talk AI. We hear (rightly) a lot about the risks. We also hear about the economic threats it poses to artists (also rightly), and increasingly about its creative possibilities (though I’m still a bit skeptical). What are your thoughts on the current state of the discussion? This question targets both the general economic and cultural implications, as well as what AI means for your own creative practice.
Jessica Ekomane: I wish people would stop anthropomorphising it and realise that this is a mechanism that allows the companies to escape accountability. I was inspired to try to stick to calling it “machine learning”, after reading Melanie Michell’s book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. As I already make use of algorithmic processes in my work, I am not against some automation per se. Although one could perhaps think of interesting or useful applications, I imagine that its development will most likely turn into an overproduction of meaningless content based on stolen data. And into a new way to exploit cheap or free labour.
Coming from that: what role does failure or unpredictability play in your process? Are you someone who welcomes glitches or do they drive you mad?
Jessica Ekomane: I’m often even seeking for glitches and would place them front and centre in a work. My composition process is often akin to improvisation until I find an interesting thread I can pull and find a structure for it. Beyond that context I’ve been thinking a lot of about failure in the last years, in relation to vulnerability. I am still examining the latter.
Jessica Ekomane (Photo: Jean-Baptiste Garcia)
Right now, we’re witnessing a troubling reduction in public funding for the arts. You’re currently a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Program 2024/25; can you share how this fellowship has enabled work that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise?
Jessica Ekomane: Knowing that your rent and your basic needs will be covered, and that you will get a regular monthly income for two years, is such a privilege as an artist. It enables you to concentrate much more on the part of the process for which you wouldn’t necessarily have the time otherwise. For example to do more reading or take more time to experiment and develop new skills. Another very important thing that it provides is a dedicated budget for a specific project. It allowed me to make my basic working conditions much better also, and meet extremely interesting artists and thinkers whose insights have been really precious. I was lucky as well that this happened in a moment of great insecurity for the cultural sector, as it definitely helped navigate the onset of this moment although what is presently unraveling is quite worrying.
You’ve lived in Berlin for 15 years. How do you perceive the city and its cultural landscape today compared to 2010?
Jessica Ekomane: It is hard to define exactly how the city has changed yet. But I witnessed a few things such as the growing institutionalisation of the creative scene. A lot of things are also much more slick and homogeneous. It is all much less punk, less anti-mainstream and anti-capitalist. When I arrived in the city the energy and creativity was wild and exceptional, you would encounter the craziest events in the most unlikely places. Life and rent were extremely affordable. But it is still an inspiring city and I still love it despite the current tough times. At the moment it also seems as if private funding will play a growing role in the near future, which is also a paradigm shift.
Your solo show Antechamber was on view at Kunstwerke in Berlin (curated by Emma Enderby, until May 4). First of all, Antechamber to what? (Kind of a funny title for a piece located in the attic!)
Jessica Ekomane: I wanted to focus exactly on that: the act of waiting. And leave it open as to what is being waited for, which is interesting because it is not a productive action and thus not usually considered a moment of value. Concentrating on waiting allows to pay attention to the experience of time itself, for itself.
Jessica Ekomane (Photo: Jean-Baptiste Garcia)
For this installation, you worked with a software that calculates and plays the music, right? Could you explain that a bit more?
Jessica Ekomane: Yes, that software is called MaxMSP and it allows to work with real time sound synthesis and algorithmic processes. This is my main music-making tool. In the specific case of Antechamber, the sounds you hear are rhythmical translations of various time-keeping systems and ways of dividing time. For example one specific scenario gives you to hear Unix Time, which is an ever growing decimal number representing the number of non-leaps seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970. Many computers use that arbitrary date to keep track of time, and newer systems can count up until 20 times the age of the Universe, forward and backward. Here the idea was to use sounds to make you perceive how that big number is moving.
What does this mean for your own sensations while listening to the music?
Jessica Ekomane: In that case it means that the sounds are live-generated every time and I could add small variations along the way, such as adjusting some sounds to the actual time of the day. It also gives me a lot more freedom and flexibility to design sounds than many other digital audio workstations.
Do you feel that your perception of time changes while listening to music?
Jessica Ekomane: Yes for sure. If I listen to music I enjoy, time does fly faster and feels more intense. That’s why you have to listen to certain songs on repeat. In the contrary if the music doesn’t speak to me, time can feel dull and like it stretches to the extreme.
And how about while composing, does time feel different then as well?
Jessica Ekomane: The experience is a little bit similar, depending on whether I am inspired or not. Most often than not, I feel like I am always running out of time.
Jessica Ekomane (Photo: Jean-Baptiste Garcia)
On the opening night, there was an afterparty with Caroline Polachek as DJ. Just a few days ago, you gave a concert in the exhibition context alongside KMRU, Antonia Majaca, and Okkyung Lee. What I’m getting from all this is: connecting your art to a broader community is very important to you, right?
Jessica Ekomane: I think my music and art belong to all those different communities you’ve been mentioning, I do not like to be elitist or exclusive. There is even often a reflection around accessibility behind what I do. I hate being put in a box, when I feel like this is happening I always try to escape it. I feel like all the different projects I’ve been doing along the years are a testimony to the multiplicity of my interests and practice. I also wanted people to get used to see me doing a lot of things, while being able to connect the dots among all of them.
At the Blaues Rauschen Festival, you’ll take part in a talk (in cooperation with the Institute for Media Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, headed by Natalie Pielok) about your work. Do you sometimes feel the weight of music being both a field of creative expression and a medium for cultural and speculative thought? You know what I mean—like music has somehow lost its innocence?
Jessica Ekomane: Most artists that really inspire me are fascinating thinkers too! But I never want words to take precedence over the experience of the music. It should be felt with the body and not (just) the head.
Is there anything you’d like to share in advance about your live performance at Blaues Rauschen?
Jessica Ekomane: I often prioritise experience over speech. I do not like to say too much, over explain or give instructions. I do hope the work speak for itself, and that the intention will translate into the experience.
Thanks so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts. It’s deeply appreciated.
Jessica Ekomane (Photo: Philippe Gerlach)
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